Television advertising remains the largest advertising category in the United States and has been the premium medium for advertising since the 1950s. Television networks, broadcasters, and cable companies generate approximately 75 billion dollars per year in revenue from ads inserted into television program breaks.
Advertisers bid for placement in commercial breaks, and can optionally specify the television program, network, or hours during which they would want their ad to run. In turn, television networks then insert the ad based on the advertiser constraints. Ads are then embedded/inserted into the video stream in commercial breaks.
However there are many questions to be answered for television networks about exactly how to insert the ads. Television networks generally have fairly loose constraints about what ads they can insert where. How should they insert ads so as to maximize their yield, and perhaps the yield for their advertising clients also?
Previous work in ad relevance is most prevalent in online advertising (Hillard, et. al., 2010). Bing and Google utilize click through rate as a measure of relevance to balance revenue generation with user experience. Ranking functions for search ads use click through rate multiplied by price (Jansen, 2006). In contrast, there has been little work on TV ad relevance (Hanssens, et. al., 2001; Johansson, 1979; Simon and Arndt, 1980; Jones, 1997; Vakratsas, et. al., 2004). Ewing (2013) used survey methods to measure television ad relevance from 2002 to 2013. However this work was at a very high level and it did not go into networks, programs, or how to improve relevance. Zigmond, Dorai-Raj, Interian and Naverniouk (2009) used viewer tune-away behavior during commercial breaks as a proxy for relevance. However, none of the aforementioned studies have resulted in a suitable level of individual-specific targeting desired by television advertisers today.
The present disclosure is directed to overcoming one or more of these above-referenced challenges.